Jörg wrote:
> I have made a new program to generate the voice clips, see my tool
> collection:
>
http://joerg.hohensohn.bei.t-online.de/archos/speech/voicefont/authoring_tools/> The new one is "lang2wav", which generates the whole bunch of speech clips
> as .wav without a 3rd party program like TextAloud. Input is the .lang
file,
> it uses the default voice as configured in the Control Panel. After
running
> it, you can batch-encode (maybe first batch-trim) the lot and run
"voicefont"
> to make the final language file. Result should be not larger than 1.5 MB,
else
> tune the encoder parameters. So the process is pretty simple now, and
> lang2wav is way faster than TextAloud.
>
> We're still waiting for a volunteer to do something similar under Linux
with
> e.g. the "Festival" TTS program, hint, wink. This could then be part of
the
> automated build.

Mind that I'm not making any promises here, but due to my inability to
get the SAPI stuff to work on my Win98SE/98lite installation (the
mp3ClipGen.vbs kept on telling me I didn't have SAPI installed, although
I had and the speech control panel even let me test some of the L&H
voices), I've gotten festival to run on my Gentoo Linux installation
instead late yesterday evening.

I've also hacked up a shell script to do what mp3ClipGen does. It still
has a bug and a few rough edges (e.g. I'd like to be able to select the
voice, although I'm sure I'll personally stay with the arctic_slt voice,
it's the best festival voice I've found so far; and it relies on the
festival server already running on the local server and default port),
but will get finished over the weekend, hopefully.

If there's any time and energy left after this, I'll give the voicefont
generation a try. And in the unlikely event that there's even more time
and energy left, I may try producing a german.voice using the adaption
of festival to German.

If anyone thinks they can do better in the reliability or timeliness
departments, don't let this stop you! ;-)

PS: With Talkbox now included, Rockbox kicks some serious ass. Thanks to
all the developers and especially Jörg!